No source, other than the Bible itself, provides more relevant information on the first century than the work of Flavius Josephus. This newly edited version updates the original 18th century language; includes commentary by the award winning author…
The Achaemenid Persian Empire, at its greatest territorial extent under Darius I (r.522-486 BCE), held sway over territory stretching from the Indus River Valley to southeastern Europe and from the western Himalayas to northeast Africa. In this book…
Focuses on the religious passions that make fundamentalists battle over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and why this sacred site has become a catalyst for potential conflict.
The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon is an exciting story of detection involving legends, expert decipherment of ancient texts, and a vivid description of a little-known civilization. Recognized in ancient times as one of the Seven Wonders o…
This book is an in-depth treatment of the antecedents and first florescence of early state and urban societies in the alluvial lowlands of Mesopotamia over nearly three millennia, from approximately 5000 to 2100 BC. Susan Pollock’s approach is…
This book is an in-depth treatment of the antecedents and first florescence of early state and urban societies in the alluvial lowlands of Mesopotamia over nearly three millennia, from approximately 5000 to 2100 BC. Susan Pollock's approach is expli…
The rediscovery of Assyria in the 1840s transformed Western views on the origins of civilisation. The excavation of Nineveh proved that even the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians together did not constitute the ancient world. These peoples had nothing to…
In AD 66 a local disturbance in Caesarea caused by Greeks sacrificing birds in front of a local synagogue exploded into a pan-Jewish revolt against their Roman overlords. Gaining momentum, the rebels successfully occupied Jerusalem and drove off an…
Grounded in the latest archeological developments, Victor Matthews's A Brief History of Ancient Israel presents a concise history of Israel covering the ancestral period, conquest and settlement, the monarchy, and both the exilic and postexilic peri…
Around 550 B.C.E. the Persian people-who were previously practically unknown in the annals of history-emerged from their base in southern Iran (Fars) and engaged in a monumental adventure that, under the leadership of Cyrus the Great and his success…
Situated in an area roughly corresponding to present-day Iraq, Mesopotamia is one of the great, ancient civilizations, though it is still relatively unknown. Yet, over 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the very first cities were created. This is the f…
In Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit Jodi Magness unearths -footprints- buried in both archaeological and literary evidence to shed new light on Jewish daily life in Palestine from the mid-first century b.c.e. to 70 c.e. -- the time and place of Jesus' l…
Xenophon's Anabasis, or The Expedition of Cyrus, is one of the most exciting historical narratives-as well as the most important autobiographical work-to have survived from ancient Greece. It tells the story of Cyrus, a young and charismatic Persian…
The first major history of the scholarly quest to answer the question of Jewish origins The Jews have one of the longest continuously recorded histories of any people in the world, but what do we actually know about their origins? While many think t…
The only book of its kind to cover both the Achaemenid period and the thousand years following Alexander's conquest, The Persians explores the period from the seventh century BC, to the seventh century AD, and presents a comprehensive introduction t…
Josephus' account of a war marked by treachery and atrocity is a superbly detailed and evocative record of the Jewish rebellion against Rome between AD 66 and 70. Originally a rebel leader, Josephus changed sides after he was captured to become a Ro…
Mesopotamia produced one of the best-known ancient civilizations, with a literate, urban culture and highly-developed political institutions. In this fully revised and expanded edition of her classic text, Sumer and the Sumerians, Harriet Crawford r…
First published in 1964, Ancient Iraq is the classic work on Mesopotamia and the great civilizations that sprung from the region bounded by the Euphrates and Tigris. It remains an invaluable primer for anyone fascinated by the extraordinary ruins an…
Modern-day archaeological discoveries in the Near East continue to illuminate our understanding of the ancient world, including the many contributions made by the people of Mesopotamia to literature, art, government, and urban life The Handbook to L…
For almost three thousand years, a succession of glorious communities flourished in ancient Mesopotamia. This book explores the culture of these great civilisations, which gave rise to literature, art, government, and urban life. It examines the dai…
Out of a lifetime of study of the ancient Near East, Professor Olmstead has gathered previously unknown material into the story of the life, times, and thought of the Persians, told for the first time from the Persian rather than the traditional Gre…
Josephus, soldier, statesman, historian, was a Jew born at Jerusalem about 37 CE. A man of high descent, he early became learned in Jewish law and Greek literature and was a Pharisee. After pleading in Rome the cause of some Jewish priests he return…
"This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."-Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Revie…
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Holy Land covers the 3,000 years which saw the rise of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-and relates the familiar stories of the sacred texts with the fruits of modern scholarship. Beginning with the origins of t…
Backed by an unparalleled military force, Sargon II outwitted and outfought powerful competitors to extend Assyrian territory and secure his throne. As Sarah C. Melville shows through a detailed analysis of each of his campaigns, the king used his a…
A vivid portrait of the early years of biblical archaeology from the acclaimed author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed In 1925, James Henry Breasted, famed Egyptologist and director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago…
Cyrus the Great was one of the most influential figures in history, an enlightened ruler and brilliant general who, via sword, cunning and wisdom, in the 6th century BC created the Persian Empire, largest empire known to man to that time. His army w…
Mesopotamian houses excavated at Ur and Nippur represent a unique archaeological context for the analysis of the interaction of verbal and nonverbal sign systems in that archaeologists can combine archival evidence of the III-II millennium BC with w…
Kathleen Kenyon died in 1978 without having published final reports on her excavations in Jerusalem. These are being now published in five volumes. This volume concentrates on finds outside the walls of the Iron Age city, and particularly on the eni…
Israel in Transition 2 is the second in a two-volume work addressing some of the historical problems relating to the early history of Israel, from its first mention around 1200 BCE to the beginnings of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. During this f…
This work centres on one central question: should the passage from the Late Bronze II to the Iron I Age in Palestine, from the 13th to the 11th centuries BCE, be viewed, as is classically accepted, simply as a period of transition characterised by o…
Lions and rams and bulls! Oh, my! See them in all their golden splendor. This book contains 20 full-color postcards featuring the animals that decorated the treasures of Ur-the gold and lapis lazuli bull-head from the Great Lyre, the gold and lapis…
Nebuchadnezzar I (r. 1125-1104) was one of the more significant and successful kings to rule Babylonia in the intervening period between the demise of the Kassite Dynasty in the 12th century at the end of the Late Bronze Age, and the emergence of a…
The fourth millennium BC was a critical period of socio-economic and political transformation in the Iranian Plateau and its surrounding zones. This period witnessed the appearance of the world's earliest urban centres, hierarchical administrative s…
For at least 15 years, and with several significant works, Hugh Williamson contributed to the movement to recapture the importance of the biblical books of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. Behind his widely acclaimed commentaries on these books lay ma…
Due to an important number of salvage projects and rescue excavations in Northern Syria, Southern Turkey and Northern Iraq, the archaeological records documenting Upper Mesopotamia drastically increased these last decades. More than 300 regular or r…
The regions that compose the current state of Israel and the emerging state of Palestine have yielded a wealth of fascinating archaeological evidence, from the Dead Sea Scrolls found in a cave in 1947 by a Bedouin searching for a lost sheep, to the…
A decade of zooarchaeological fieldwork (1992-2001) went into Mary Stiner's pathbreaking analysis of changes in human ecology from the early Mousterian period through the end of Paleolithic cultures in the Levant. Stiner employs a comparative approa…
The last of Cyrus the Great's dynastic inheritors and the legendary enemy of Alexander the Great, Darius III ruled over a Persian Empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Indus River. Yet, despite being the most powerful king of his time,…
An account of Judas Maccabeus' battles against the Seleucid empire between 166 and 160 B.C.
Josette Elayi's Sennacherib, King of Assyria is the only extant biography of Sargon II's infamous son. This critical resource for students and scholars traces the reign of Sennacherib in context in order to illuminate more fully the life and contrib…
These essays represent a summation of Piotr Steinkeller's decades-long thinking and writing about the history of third millennium BCE Babylonia and the ways in which it is reflected in ancient historical and literary sources and art, as well as of h…
Das vorliegende Buch stellt einen Versuch dar, die L cke in der Geschichte des Sumerischen zu schlie en, die bislang zwischen den umfangreichen, gut untersuchten Textcorpora des sp ten dritten und fr hen zweiten Jahrtausends v. Chr. und den relativ…
Tells the story of archaeological travel and excavation in Iraq -- then Mesopotamia -- from the time of the great Arab geographers to the 2003 devastation of the Iraq National Museum. Fagan tells of Henry Rawlinson, Jules Oppert, and Edward Hincks,…
Rome and Judea in Transition is the first English-language book to study exclusively the first century and a half of Roman-Judean political relations (164-37 B.C.). It presents a comprehensive reassessment of the Late Republic's involvement in the L…
The Israelites and the Greeks formed "the first free societies, cultivating rain-watered fields around a fortified citadel, recording their words about the human situation in a widely-accessible alphabetic script." With a keen eye for both compariso…
Includes 164 b/w figures and 18 tables. Gesher is a small Middle Bronze Age IIA cemetery site located in the central Jordan Valley in Israel. Initial excavations in 1986-1987 indicated the site's importance for examining population and settlement i…
Any consideration of the Iranian plateau must include the important site of Hasanlu in northern Iran. The Museum carried out excavations from 1956 through 1977. A major aspect of the research focused on the Iron Age settlement. This fortified town w…
This volume includes ten new studies, most of which were originally presented at the 14th World Congress of Jewish Studies, held in Jerusalem in 2005. The studies all deal with the changes that occurred in the Land of Israel during the Persian and e…
The Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon continues its final report series with a study of the Iron Age I. Following the dramatic collapse of the Mediterranean world at the end of the Bronze Age, new groups emerged across the Levantine littoral. One of…
Das Alte Testament ist vielfach mit der Geschichte und Kultur des Alten Israel und seiner altorientalischen Umwelt verbunden. Die vorliegenden Aufsatze, die vor allem literarhistorisch undarchaologischargumentieren, leisten einen wichtigen kultur- u…
